Tag: free speech

45% Of College Students Justify Violence To Stop ‘Hate Speech’: Survey

A new survey finds that nearly half of undergraduate students support censorship, shout-downs, and physical violence to suppress what they consider “hate speech” or offensive ideas.

Fox News reports that the 2026 National Undergraduate Student Survey, released this month by the Buckley Institute, shows that 45 percent of undergraduate students surveyed believe physical violence can be justified to stop so-called hate speech. That number is up 6 points from 2025 and ties the all-time record set in 2023.

The survey, which polled 803 full-time undergraduate students at four-year public and private colleges across the United States, revealed several record-high metrics concerning free expression on campus, according to Yahoo.

Other takeaways from the survey were that 46 percent of students support shout downs and 40 percent believe that offensive speech should be subject to criminal prosecution.

Some 42 percent of respondents said that political comments they disagree with can be harmful to their mental health, up 4 points from last year; the highest reading in the 5 years this question has been monitored.

The findings prompted Cornerstone University President Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riaño to warn that higher education has “lost its way.”

Moreno-Riaño told Fox News Digital:

American colleges and universities for a long time now have really ceased to form students morally and are teaching resentment, teaching grievance politics, teaching violent entitlement. So, when graduates leave these universities, they leave with that. They’re not leaving with a moral formation of their hearts, their minds, their lives. They’re leaving with resentment.

Moreno-Riaño also cautioned that many colleges and universities are preparing “socialists and Marxists” who want entitlement and to “destroy the system” rather than “build it, make it, refine it and improve it.”

The Cornerstone University president also stressed that American higher education “has to shift,” saying it needs to “take moral formation seriously and not be grounded in entitlement and grievance culture.”

The Buckley Institute survey was conducted online between Sept. 5 and Sept. 14 by Inquire LLC and included 803 full-time undergraduate students under age 25 attending four-year public or private colleges and universities.

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“We’re Really in Trouble Here”: British Commentator’s Powerful Reality Check About Islam’s Special Protection and the Death of Free Speech in the UK

Ada Akpala, a writer, YouTuber, broadcaster, and commentator, recently appeared as a panelist on the GB News show Patrick Christys Tonight.

In the clip, she discusses free speech in the UK, contrasting the treatment of criticism of Christianity versus Islam, referencing issues such as two-tier policing and the cultural/religious double standards that exist in the UK.

Akpala, “I currently live in a country that I can burn a Bible, I can spit on a Bible, I can stamp on a Bible, and I’ll go about my day.”

“If I burn a Quran, the law might not even be on my side, as we saw with the Turkish asylum seeker.”

“I live in a country today that I can say anything I want on this show right now about Jesus. None of you will attack me.”

“But if I said something about Muhammad, I’ll probably put myself, and even those here who are on screen with me, at risk.”

“Have you heard from the Batley teacher yet? No.”

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Pro-censorship Sacha Baron Cohen’s Movie ‘Ali G’ Loses Expected Theatrical Rollout After ‘Racism’ Uproar

Oh my, this is beyond glorious. Sacha Baron Cohen is a big, fat, fascist fan of censorship, and now his new Ali G movie has lost its theatrical rollout after woketards declared it racist.

Let’s play a game: Who said this…? Go on. Try to guess … who said this?

This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Is the speaker…

a) The woketards looking to censor the Ali G movie?

b) The fascist Sacha Baron Cohen looking to censor the rest of us, never dreaming his fascist demands would someday be used to kill something of his?

Oh, you know it’s “b,” baby. And now the universe has bent towards justice…

I’m told that this ‘Ali G’ movie will play theatrically for only one week. That’s it. The original plan was for a more robust rollout, but things have changed since then. The film, which is Cohen’s feature directorial debut, has been mired in controversy, especially in the UK. Whether that controversy is what led to a shorter rollout has not been confirmed.

If you remember, Picturehouse Cinemas, a UK cinema chain, announced that it would not screen “Ali G: Who Iz I?” in October, mostly because of the character’s “racist stereotypes.” The campaign is being led by the media-monitoring organization NewsCord, which has urged other major UK cinema chains, including Odeon, Cineworld, Vue, Everyman and Showcase, to refuse to screen the movie.

The group claims Cohen uses satire as a “cover for enforcing racist stereotypes” and has accused the Ali G revival of bringing back a “racist caricature.” More than 27,000 emails (!) have reportedly been sent to cinema chains.

Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t want to live in a world where “racists” have access to platforms, and now his big comeback movie has been branded racist, and now he’s lost the “robust rollout,” and we should all be happy for Sacha Barton Cohen because he’s getting exactly what he advocated for.

Of course, his Ali G character is not racist. He’s making fun of white kids who adopt black culture, not black people.

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The Social Reckoning Wants the Speech Referees Back

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, written and directed by the prominent screenwriter and produced by Sony, isn’t a movie about Facebook, even though it is based on the social media giant’s story and its controversial global impact.

This is actually political activism with a running time of 112 minutes.

In April 2024, on The Town podcast, Sorkin said, “I blame Facebook for January 6” – and when asked why, he said, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”

He didn’t stop there. Sorkin, who is known for his TV series The West Wing and The Newsroom, as well as films like The Social Network, said, “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. There’s just growth.”

On the same podcast, Sorkin referred to the 2024 election as “an election about Trump vs. not-Trump, and there is an existential choice there.”

He directed it himself to get it out before the midterms: “I didn’t want The Social Reckoning to come out a year after the midterm elections,” and “I wanted it to come out now.”

The timing of the movie’s release, and the fact it was directed by Sorkin himself to make that happen, is not the only clue that this is a piece of political persuasion.

Aaron Sorkin and Sony Pictures are trying very hard to sell The Social Reckoning as something it’s not – but in the process, they are also inadvertently revealing what it actually is.

“I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico, as reported by TheWrap. “I just think it shouldn’t be.”

On NBC’s Today show, he went for the “anti-truth” angle: “The film shouldn’t be political unless you are somebody who is anti-the truth, okay?”

So those who don’t accept Sorkin’s truth are anti-the-truth.

On CBS, he said that if he ever got the chance to talk to Mark Zuckerberg, he would tell him, “You want to make the world a better place? Don’t make the truth up for grabs.”

Sorkin is not interested in argument. He is interested in selling his movie. And he has a willing partner in Sony, whose CEO, Tom Rothman, said, “I’m a free speech absolutist too, but I know you can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater. I know that there is a difference between free speech and falsehood.”

(Yes, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater.)

As for falsehood – who gets to decide what that is? Sorkin and Rothman? Meta’s “fact-checkers”? The government?

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UK’s Online Safety Act has silenced, punished free speech in ways that pose as warning to Americans

It’s a focal point of national discussion: online hate, misinformation and what constitutes each. While many Americans still consider the First Amendment a near-absolute for free speech, Britain has taken a starkly different approach. 

The country’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, was billed as protection for kids. But it’s unleashed what many consider disturbing policing of online speech. And it comes with a warning for people in the U.S. 

In Southport, England, in 2024, the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants stabbed to death three little girls and injured 12 others, slashing one six-year-old 122 times and trying to cut off her head. The horrific murders sparked riots and a free speech crackdown.

Jamie Michael, a former Royal Marine and father of two young daughters, took to Facebook with a call to action.

“I posted a 12-minute video asking, calling on the community to come together and have a meeting so that we can discuss safety measures for the schools and parks,” Michael told Full Measure in an interview in London.

Police soon showed up at his workplace in Wales – and arrested him.

“The words they said: that could be “indecent racial hatred,” Michael said. “They actually said that I’d had terrorist intentions, that’s what was on the police report.”

While he was in jail, Michael says, officials altered a transcript of his Facebook video – to make it look like he’d admitted to starting a riot. Yet he’d said no such thing.

“So I put my hand up in the court to say, you know, ‘Things are wrong.’ [I] wanted to say, ‘That’s wrong, and this is wrong,’ and the judge literally shouted me down, said, ‘Sit down.’ He said, ‘This isn’t a place for you to speak.’ And I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Businesswoman Bernie Spofforth was also arrested for her social media post after the Southport murders.

“I was taken to the police station and held for 36 hours like a terrorist. Held for 36 hours,” she says.

Her offense? She had shared the identity circulating online of a supposed suspect: asylum seeker Ali Al-Shakati. 

Spofforth didn’t know it, but someone had made up the name. She deleted the post when she couldn’t confirm the name. But days later, police came for her, too.

“What were they trying to prove?” Full Measure asked her.

“Malicious communications and making up communications in a racist way,” Spofforth responded. “ They thought I’d made the name up in order to create hate and to incite violence, which, of course, I didn’t do.”

It’s a 2023 British law that’s largely responsible: the Online Safety Act. The government framed it as vital to protecting children. But Claire Fox says shocking provisions in the fine print outlaw speech that “harms.” 

Fox is a member of the British House of Lords in Parliament and founder of the Academy of Ideas, which advocates for free speech.

She was one of the only legislators who opposed the British bill because of broad generalizations as to what it criminalized.

“In this particular bill, the Online Safety Act, they then stressed, ‘Well, no, when we say ‘harm,’ we don’t mean physical harm, we mean psychological harm.’ Psychological harm is an elastic term that’s become inflated beyond any recognition, which basically says, you know, anything can be harmful,” Fox told Full Measure.

“You hurt my feelings?” Full Measure asked.

“You hurt my feelings,” Fox confirmed. “And that’s what happened through the online safety bill. And that became institutionalized in law.”

Police in England and Wales arrested more than 12,000 people in 2023 alone for violating communications law: not only for obvious incitement to violence but also for private messages and chats deemed to persistently cause “annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety.”

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New Mexico Found a Way to Fine Platforms for Speech It Didn’t Delete

A civil jury has found Meta liable for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and now the judge is being asked to order the company to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion.

At a hearing on October 1 in Santa Fe, special prosecutor Randi McGinn asked Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court to order Meta to pay this amount, while a lawyer for the social media giant said such a penalty would be “an astronomical” one, violating “a host of constitutional provisions.”

Meta is being punished for making false statements about user privacy, and also for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough.

The verdict was delivered on September 25, finding Meta had made 26 false or misleading statements, resulting in nearly 43.9 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This would translate to a maximum of $5,000 per violation, or $219 billion in all – more than the $206 billion the tobacco industry had to pay in a settlement in 1998. The state asked for about 20% of this amount.

The number of violations was arrived at by counting the number of people in New Mexico, and the number of Facebook users in the state, and then multiplying these numbers by the number of times Meta made false statements in news outlets and on its own platforms.

The state had to show only that harm was likely, not that it actually occurred.

Meta is being punished for lying about how it handled user data, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw a third party harvest data from about 87 million profiles. The company is also being punished for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough – and the number of violations in this category is about a quarter of the total.

The New Mexico case is not the only one where Meta is being forced to pay up – in March, a Santa Fe jury ordered it to pay $375 million in a case involving child safety on Facebook and Instagram, and in August, the judge in that case added another $567 million for a youth mental health fund.

In August, 47 states reached a settlement with Meta, along with other social media companies, that will see them pay $17 billion. Judge Mathew mentioned this during the October 1 hearing, saying that due process suggests he should opt for a much lower amount than what the state of New Mexico is asking for.

During the hearing, Meta’s lawyer Matt Nicholson described the case as “about 26 statements over 11 years” and said that the state “made absolutely no showing that anyone in the state of New Mexico ever saw them, relied on them or were harmed by them in any way.”

McGinn countered that “the one thing you didn’t hear from counsel is an apology.”

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UK Police Arrest 15-Year-Old Over Posts Mocking Politician

Good news for those in the UK who were worried that their country’s police might have been getting a little too comfortable with the idea of going after people for what they say online.

No such luck.

We now learn that four officers, from the West Midlands force, were dispatched to the home of a 15-year-old, to arrest him. And this was no dawn raid to take in some dangerous terrorist suspect – it was a 15-year-old boy who had been making fun of a local councillor’s attire.

And the police seized his phone and laptop.

The whole thing started when the teenager, a Reform UK party activist, posted on Facebook about Conservative councillor Simon Bennett’s conduct and dress at council meetings in Wolverhampton.

Bennett reported the teenager to the police, saying that the posts were “quite personal about my appearance.”

One of the posts compared Bennett’s appearance to that of a “rent boy.” Another one said, “Why do some councillors rock up at a scrutiny committee in shorts and t-shirt in trainers? So unprofessional.”

And then there was one where the teenager Photoshopped rabbit ears onto a picture of Bennett, with the comment, “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.”

Half asleep when the police came for him, the boy recalls the officers telling him that the arrest was for harassment, malicious communications, or a hate crime – or some mix of these. One officer said it was “to do with social media.”

The teenager, who has only been identified as Fraser, was taken in for questioning, and after that, he was bailed and banned from attending council meetings in Wolverhampton.

The police have not explained why four officers were needed to make the arrest.

“The police have not arrested for no reason,” he said. “There were a number of posts that targeted me…It was unpleasant and I was targeted by a child I had no way of dealing with.”

And the councillor also revealed that he had asked the council for advice on what to do, “and they thought it best to report it to the police.”

The police, in turn, “thought it merited arresting him,” Bennett said.

The Free Speech Union has taken up the case and intends to sue the police for “wrongful arrest” and “false imprisonment.”

Meanwhile, the group’s lawyers have written to the police to say that “plainly there has been no offence and the arrest and investigation represent an egregious interference with his rights.”

Fraser, who says he was more active online in criticizing the local Labour Party (which runs the council) than the Conservatives, is still waiting to learn if he will be charged.

This latest incident may just take the cake. Four officers, a laptop seized, and a teenager hauled off – for making fun of a councillor’s outfit. And the police wonder why they are losing the trust of the public.

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Retired Police Officer Convicted and Fined Over £1,000 for Sharing Bacon Meme About Child Marriage — Warns ‘Blasphemy Law Is Back’

Britain’s relentless crackdown on so-called “offensive” speech has produced yet another astonishing criminal conviction, this time against a retired police officer who spent nearly three decades serving the public.

Stephen Gray, 65, served nearly 30 years with Cleveland Police. He and his wife Alex, 62, have fostered children. None of that mattered once a neighbor he was already feuding with over a sewage pipe tipped off police about two posts Gray had reshared.

According to The Telegraph and the Free Speech Union, Gray was interviewed under caution, the Crown Prosecution Service initially decided there was no realistic prospect of conviction, and the neighbor then used the Victims’ Right to Review scheme to force the case back on. The neighbor was not Muslim.

At Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in April 2026, District Judge Steven Hood split the difference in the way only two-tier Britain can.

One post, “time for mass deportation,” paired with a caption about a supposed “12-year-old Mohammed” who wanted donors to move him from a three-star hotel to a five-star hotel with a better halal menu, free Wi-Fi, Sky, and a location nearer a girls’ school, was treated as politics.

The judge said it concerned an issue already debated in Parliament and acquitted Gray.

The second post was the one that counted. It showed a rasher of bacon next to a man in a turban, with the caption: “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

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Cambridge University Declares Free Speech Should Be ‘Restricted’

Gonville and Caius College, one of Cambridge’s oldest foundations, is compelling its undergraduates to attend mandatory “inclusivity training” from the start of term.

The 90-minute sessions are being delivered by Stop Hate UK, a ‘charity’ activist organisation whose own materials tell students their free speech rights may be restricted, that “Islamophobia is a crime”, and that a facial expression can count as harm.

The order lands in the same university that spent the better part of two years investigating a philosopher for lawful speech, and in the same education system that has spent 2026 drilling children in white privilege, “racism requires power”, and compulsory hijabs.

According to an email from the college’s education and tutorial office, seen by The Spectator, “attendance by undergraduate students is mandatory. It is important for the community as a whole to ensure a collective and unified response.” The course, due to run from the week commencing 5 October, will cover “demonstrating inclusive behaviours” and “recognition of a hate incident and its impact.”

A Caius spokesman told The Spectator the college had, “in consultation with student representatives,” committed to “hosting facilitated discussions around inclusivity to support the whole community at Caius.”

That is a softer description than the email students actually received. Mandatory attendance and a demand for a “collective and unified response” is not a discussion. It is an instruction.

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Boston Globe Praised Harvard for Suppressing Free Speech to Save It

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) ran an article contrasting two Boston-area universities’ approaches to campus free speech. Penned by higher education reporter Mike Damiano, the piece reads like an installment of Highlights for Children‘s didactic “Goofus and Gallant” feature, with one school clearly doing it right while the other is letting down the cause of free speech.

Northeastern University plays the role of the loathsome Goofus, with critics remarking that the “school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.”

Meanwhile Harvard, in Gallant fashion,

undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.

That certainly makes it sound better than Northeastern’s “hands-off approach.” But you have to ask: What did Harvard’s leadership actually do for speech when they put their hands on it?

Well, for one thing, “they have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom.” Huh—telling faculty not to talk about their politics does not actually sound like promoting free speech.

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